The invention relates to the field of human machine interfaces in an aircraft cabin. In particular, the invention relates to a method, a computer program and a computer-readable medium for operating a control panel of an aircraft. Furthermore, the invention relates to an aircraft system and an aircraft.
Passenger airplanes usually comprise one or more control panels for controlling cabin devices such as lights and air conditioning inside the passenger cabin. Also further information associated with the cabin, such as, for example, a passenger call or the current temperature, may be displayed on a control panel. DE 10 2008 035 090 A1 and US 2010 020038 A1 show examples of such control panels.
A control panel may be connected to a central controller of the aircraft (sometimes called Director (in the case of the cabin intercommunication data system, CIDS)), which provides communication interfaces between the control panel and the respective cabin device. However, some control panels are directly connected to their cabin device and control it directly. The control panels may have user interfaces designed by different manufacturers and usually the control functions are functionally grouped, i.e. with respect to controlled cabin devices. On the display of the control panel, different functions and/or applications for the aircraft cabin are usually handled in parallel. In this case, the user (normally a flight attendant) has to switch between the functions and applications and may have to search and enter the same kind of data in each application. Additionally, each application may have its own work and page flow.